I’m at the Syndicate conference in New York. Just did the unkeynote. Have no idea whether it worked. You tell me.
: The meatiest thing that came out of it was a lot of confusion and complaint about the state of tagging. It’s time for taggercon.
: Richard Edelman, who’s becoming known as the most clueful flack, says that they are getting rid of the “message triangle,” the old, accepted wisdom of media training that taught the speaker to keep coming back to three points no matter what the question is. He says the John Kerry failed in his debates because he was too-well trained; he kept coming back to those points. Too much training reduces credibility, he says.
He says that PR people in the future should be “chief listening officers.” Yes, but that should be the job of all execs, no?
: Thinking about it, I’d do the unkeynote differently, modeling it more on the unconference. It needs to start with a goal — a question to answer, a problem to solve, a debate to surface or settle, so people try to pull together to some end and the conversation isn’t random … and so the unkeynoter can bring the conversation back on course when it veers off (as this one did). Lesson learned.
